Kansas Wheat Festival button design winner announced

The Wellington Area Chamber of Commerce/CVB announced today that Wellington native, Devin Brown is the artist of the winning 2013 Kansas Wheat Festival Button Design Contest.

Brown's design features a maroon, yellow-gold and sky-blue color scheme with a smiling sun, beaming down on a cloud containing the Kansas Wheat Festival info for 2013. It also has a stock of wheat on the lower, left side.

"I basically just kind of tried to evolve the design from the wheat stock being the 'W' and built around that," Brown said. "I threw the sun and clouds in there just for the Summer feel of it." Brown was born and raised here in the Wheat Capital of the World, and a 2005 graduate from WHS.

"From there, I moved out here to Denver to attend the Art Institute of Colorado," he said. "Finished up there and had a rough year or so after." Brown said he was trying to do anything creative that involved a steady paycheck.

"I was a cake decorator at a grocery store," Brown laughed. "I was also doing freelance graphic design work on the side, and was finally scooped up by an ad agency out of Boulder [Colorado]." Currently he is the in-house graphic designer for a company called Ox and Co.

"Primarily we do branding for companies, logos, business cards, websites, all that," he explained. This is the third wheat festival button Brown has designed, his first was during the early 2000's, and then again in 2007. He said he hopes to be able to come visit during the Kansas Wheat Festival, July 10 to 14, which his design is now the face of.

"I've been away from Wellington for almost eight years, my wife and I are actually planning to move back to the Wichita area in a year or two," Brown said. "I just want to let everybody know that I haven't forgot where I came from."